It’s Monday, and we continue to heed Meryl Streep’s warning about football.

Hello from Los Angeles, where we’re welcoming Star Trek and Will & Grace back to TV, saluting two fallen characters on Outlander, and getting to know Jordan Klepper.

OH MY GOURD, IT’S FALL TV

Since Emmys angling has shifted so many TV premieres to the spring and streaming shows have obliterated my sense of the passage of time, I almost didn’t notice that this week marks an important one on the pop-culture calendar: the unofficial kickoff of the fall TV season. Like the corner florist stocking pumpkins, the event seems to sneak up on me earlier every year, and tap into a wistfulness for a bygone era. This week sees the premieres of CBS’s Star Trek: Discovery and its new Big Bang Theory spin-off, Young Sheldon; ABC is launching the ninth season of Modern Family; Fox is kicking off the fourth season of Empire; and a mighty busy NBC is pushing out a Will & Grace revival, Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders, the second season of This Is Us, and the 43rd season of Saturday Night Live. Emmys champ S.N.L. will barrel into Number 43 with host Ryan Gosling and musical guest Jay-Z, and will continue airing live coast to coast, as it did for the first time last season. The TV landscape is more crowded and more complicated than ever before, but the clutter of services, shows, and skinny bundles is making me feel drawn to old rituals. Heck, I might even watch one of these shows live.

FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS

V.F.’s Yohana Desta writes:

It’s 2017, and the president of the United States is in a vicious war of words with . . . the National Football League. If you missed the whole brouhaha, John Oliver ably summed it up on the latest episode of Last Week Tonight. As he explains, the absurd face-off began when Trump called players who kneel during the national anthem—a la Colin Kaepernick, who set off a firestorm of controversy in 2016 when he first chose to protest police brutality by taking a knee as the anthem played—are “sons of bitches” who should be fired for their actions. On Sunday, football players across the nation stood united against Trump’s rhetoric, either locking arms in unity or kneeling outright. Musicians and cheerleaders even joined in; in Atlanta, singer Rico Lavelle knelt and put his fist up after his rendition of the anthem, while Georgia Tech cheerleader Raianna Brown took a knee as well. Oliver took a moment to applaud those taking a stand (er, knee) against POTUS, noting that even the oft-maligned N.F.L. commissioner Roger Goodell was opposed to Trump’s divisive tweets. “When you have lost the moral high ground to Roger fucking Goodell, something is horribly wrong,” Oliver quipped. He also pointed out that the president has spent the weekend starting a pointless feud with the football world, despite the fact that 3 million people in Puerto Rico are facing a severe crisis in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Perhaps Trump will find it in his heart to tweet about that at least once.

PRETTY, PRETTY, PRETTY GOOD

V.F.’s Hillary Busis writes:

The world is just days away from finally feasting its eyes on the ninth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David’s signature comic creation. (Yeah, I said it; after all, the NBC show was called Seinfeld, not David.) Anticipation is high, not least because we haven’t seen new episodes of Curb since the early years of the Obama administration. Why, precisely, did it take David so long to come back to Curb? V.F. contributor James Andrew Millerhas a simple thesis: it’s because this freewheeling, largely improvised series is a whole lot of work to produce. “Each episode and every season of Curb are the results of a meticulously plotted architecture,” he explains in an illuminating feature, enriched by a recent interview with David himself. “Furthermore, since there are often multiple takes of the same scene, David, the director, and their editor often face more creative decisions than usual.”

GOING BOLDLY

V.F.’s Joanna Robinson writes:

In this boom time for both Peak TV and revivals, the return of Star Trek shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise; its resurrection is business as usual for an industry that leaves no Twin Peak unscaled and no Gilmore Girls under-caffeinated. But with Star Trek: Discovery, CBS hopes to do much more than boldly go where quite a few other networks have gone before. The new series, which follows the crew of the U.S.S. Shenzhou and U.S.S. Discovery, earned warm reviews for its two-part premiere this Sunday. But because CBS is also riding another current TV trend—the push to individual streaming platforms—viewers were forced to enroll in a new streaming service, CBS All Access, in order to enjoy both hours of the new space adventure. The premiere was good, but will Discovery stay good enough to keep Trekkies on the hook and paying for more? The answer, as we outline here, is somewhat complicated.

FARE THEE WELL

V.F.’s Katey Rich writes:

As a time-traveling love story, the Starz series Outlander doesn’t have just one character keeping its heroes apart—for a long time, it had two, both played by Tobias Menzies. As a cast member from the beginning, Menzies embodied both the outright-villainous Black Jack Randall in the show’s 18th-century Scotland story line, and his more complex descendant Frank Randall in the 20th century. But now, neither Randall will be around to hinder the love of Jamie (Sam Heughan) or Claire (Caitriona Balfe); both characters have been killed off in the early episodes of the show’s third season. In a behind-the-scenes video that debuted exclusively at Vanity Fair, Menzies talks about what it means to say goodbye: “It’s been a good ride,” he says, in one final bit of classic English understatement.

ALL OPPOSED

V.F.’s Hillary Busis writes:

Who, exactly, is Jordan Klepper, the gangly host of a new series premiering tonight after The Daily Show? V.F.’s Laura Bradleydigs deep into that question, explaining both the premise of Klepper’s series—it’s called The Opposition, and it’s a Colbert Report-esque parody that skewers the right-wing fringe, much as Stephen Colbert once lampooned Bill O’Reilly—and why we should trust him to bring some new flavor to the increasingly crowded late-night field. And yes, Klepper—a former Daily Show correspondent himself—does address the criticism Comedy Central faced after handing another late-night program to another genial white guy: “I get that conversation. I do. I think there is that need and that desire for diversity in late night, and in television in general.” He’ll do his part by surrounding himself with a diverse cast and crew—including Opposition correspondent Niccole Thurman, whom Bradley has pegged as an early breakout.

That’s the news for this sunny Monday. What are you seeing out there? Send tips, comments, and the fall TV show you’re most excited about to Rebecca_Keegan@condenast.com. Follow me on Twitter @thatrebecca.